Paul Bettany is a BAFTA-nominated actor who has acted with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He's a hard man to pin down, given the wide variety of roles he's had in a wide variety of movies. He's played: a young Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight's Tale; a killer albino monk assassin in The Da Vinci Code; Russell Crowe's "best friend" Charles in A Beautiful Mind and even Charles Darwin in Creation.
Scott Charles Stewart is a special effects expert who left George Lucas' ILM to found his own company, The Orphanage, which contributed effects to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Iron Man, and maybe most notably, Korean director Joon-Ho Bong's amazing monster movie The Host.
Stewart has recently started directing features, and with leading man Bettany has made a couple of religious themed action/horror films - Legion, about the Archangel Michael defending humanity from God's wrath, and Priest, based very loosely on the Koreanmanhwa graphic novel series by Min-Woo Hyung, in which Catholic priests, who bear cross tattoos on their faces, have been trained to fight vampires.
In Priest, set in a future society after the Church has defeated the vampire hordes, Bettany plays a Priest, named "Priest", who must re-enter the fray as the vampire menace reasserts itself.
I talked to Bettany and Stewart over the phone, right after the trailer for Priest debuted as a Super Bowl ad.
Michael Marano: [to Paul Bettany] Now, you've made two, very action-oriented features using religious iconography--using staid, very Catholic imagery and themes. Do you feel at odds participating in these action/adventure scenarios that use iconography that we usually thing of being very static, in a Cathedral?
PB: Interesting question! I think that if you are an actor of the moment and you say, "I'm not going to be in a vampire movie," you might not work too much! [laughs] It's peculiar. I've been asked a lot about my involvement with films about religion, and it's just something that has come up. There's been no plan for it. It's peculiar--these films do terribly well in Catholic countries, in actual fact. I remember traveling around Spain with Willem Dafoe, and he was such a huge star there because of The Last Temptation of Christ. Which one would think could cause offense, right? No, they love it! I think people in those Catholic countries are really able to separate fiction from their faith. As far as I know, these movies do very well in Latin countries. There's such rich imagery. I was raised a Catholic. And there's such rich imagery to play with. Why wouldn't you? I don't understand why you wouldn't.
MM: I was raised Catholic, and I'm a novelist. And I find myself using transubstantiation imagery at totally inappropriate moments. Once it's in there, in your head, it's there.
PB: If you look at the Bible as sort of the basis for Western literature, there's a really strong argument that it's the birth of all Western literature. You've got your good guys, you've got your baddies. It's hard not to be derivative from the Bible, and all Judeo-Christian iconography.
MM: One could also argue that it's the origin of all Western theater and film, if you go back to the Passion Plays.
PB: Absolutely! Yeah! And that "tragus" may be, possibly, the Greek word for "goat" and that it's related to "tragedy" and the sacrifices of religion--I mean, fucking hell! You were brought up Catholic! That's where all my notions of theater really came from! It's so theatrical. You go to a service in Rome, and the theater of it! You see the incense cup ["censer", or "thurible"] coming down the center aisle of the cathedral. And there's ten guys with ropes around it trying to stop it, to slow it down. Because it you get in the way, it will fucking crush you. That's the power! And that's so theatrical. There's a lesson to be learned from the power of this [ceremony].
MM: [to Scott Charles Stewart] And I'd like to talk to you about Catholic iconography.
SCS: [laughs] There's a little bit of it in these movies, huh?
MM: And you're directing The Mortal Instruments [based on the popular series of YA books by Cassandra Clare about exiled angels] next, right?
SCS: I certainly hope so!
MM: Could you address how you re-interpolate Catholic iconography for hyper-kinetic action scenes?
SCS: Yeah, Legion is way more of that than Priest, which some people may laugh at because the characters in Priest all have crosses tattooed on their faces. Legion really is a kind of theological experiment by way of 1970s action/horror. It really was a "What If?" scenario. "What if God lost faith in Man? Like He had done in Old Testament times, and do away with Man? And what if His leading angel had not lost faith in Man, and needed to prove to his Father that there was something worth saving?" And then it [Legion] started playing around with the comforting images of suburban life perverted and twisted into images of fear... and the idea that angels are supposed to be cherubic. As opposed to the old imagery of angels that portray them as fierce warriors. Something to fear. Actually images of terror. And that was something I was responding to.... We certainly upset some people with Legion. It wasn't our intent to upset people. I think a lot of people interpreted it that the movie was saying that God was the Bad Guy. And in point of fact, it actually wasn't. Not any more than it was to anyone who experienced the Flood at the time of Noah.... What's fun about playing around with that kind of iconography, there's something very different when you're playing around with Judeo-Christian in a horror context, than if you're dealing with ghosts or different kinds of things. You know, if you look at exorcism kinds of stories? People react to it differently, because we grew up with it. It's ingrained in our very culture. So there's a kind of automatic suspension of disbelief. It gets under people's skin, if they want to believe it or not. So, it's a very powerful thing in a genre story to use those kinds of elements. Priest is different, because it uses the idea of religious iconography, but it's way more interested in it being an analogue for totalitarianism and fascism. It's way more about Orwellian world than it is saying anything specific about this world, church, or religion. The film makes a very clear distinction between the power that comes from God. The priests' supernatural powers come to them through God. The "We live behind walled cities, and we're expected to shovel coal all day" aspect of the film is coming from the authority, the government, which in this case, is the Church, which the world has turned to for protection against vampires.
MM: [to Paul Bettany] Jumping out of iconography and talking about action, is there one particular scene in Priest of which you're most proud?
PB: Oh, God! To be honest, there's a couple of scenes. It is an action movie, and the two action sequences. There's an action sequence that takes place in a place that's called Nightshade, which is like a prison for vampires that has been overrun. And it's the first time that you get to see Priest really get to flex his muscles. And you sense that finally he's actually enjoying it. That's not a good thing. He is good at something again. By what he has done in the war [between the Priests and the Vampires], he has been rendered useless for normal society. And now he finds himself in an environment where he is great again. And I really loved that sequence. It's a sequence that's in the trailer where I sort of get to leap up and stab the vampire in the chest. It's just beautifully done. And the last action sequence, which is almost the whole fifth reel [laughs], on top of the train is kind of epic.
MM: [to Scott Stewart] Is there anything you'd like to talk about with regard to translating a Korean comic book to a Western action movie?
SCS: My principle allegiance was to the script and that was the real template I was working from, so maybe some of this question could be better asked of Cory Goodman, who wrote the script. He did the initial story that we were translating from.... The thing that was most influential to me, when I was first sent the script was, "How can I add something? What interesting thing could I say about the vampire genre?" Because it had been so well explored by so many films and TV shows and such over the years.... And when I thought about the character [of Priest] and the story as it was in the script, I really started to think about John Rambo, in First Blood. And the idea of Vietnam vets who were the survivors of a war that they weren't sure, at the end of the day, that they had fought it for the right reasons... who had gone faithfully into that war and done things that haunted then to this day. And when they returned, they didn't return to a ticker tape parade down Broadway like their fathers before them. They came back to a society that had so decisively fatigued and moved on from war that they only associated them with war and would call them "baby killers" and push them into the shadows of society. That was really interesting to me. So, in the mythology that's set up in our story, our story begins after the war. We set up a mythology. And with regard to... paying homage to [Priest graphic novel creator] Min-Woo Hyung, what we wanted to do was present an alternate history of the world [of the Priest comic books]. And it was a very, very expensive sequence to do in live action, and the studio said, "Well, do we really need to do this?" And I thought it was really, really important. So, I came back and I said, well, "What if I could do it for this price?" They said, "If you can really do it for this price... if you can figure out a way to do it, then you can do it." I cam back to them and told them that we're doing to it fully animated, and in 2D. So I called a very dear friend of mine [Samurai Jack creator] Genndy Tartakovsky... to come in and create this with me. And together we made this prologue to the move. And he looked at Min-Woo's work and was really influenced by it and did what he thought was an American version of it.
MM: [to Paul Bettany] What are the specific challenges of working on films that so heavily use CGI? Is it like doing "black box" theater with the green screens and the imagining of settings and characters?
PB: Some of it's peculiar. You might be fighting a stunt man in a silver suit dressed up like DEVO, which is kind of peculiar. And it gets more peculiar when you're in the air stabbing a pillow, as I was, trusting that it was going to be turned into a vampire [in post-production]. Those were odd moments. There's stuff on the train, there was stuff on the train carriage, and there was [Star Trek and Lord of the Rings'] Karl Urban [who plays a bad guy named Black Hat], with me and him fighting and a lot of wire-work, and yes, there was a blue screen. But you didn't sense it. And it didn't get in the way. And God forbid that you actually were on a moving train. At one point in the movie, I actually was on the side of a moving train at 50 miles per hour and it was fucking terrifying! [laughs] So, you wouldn't want to actually be fighting on top of that thing. The challenge is less imaginative at that point and more physical. I really wanted to do my own action. If you are in an action movie and you're not doing your own action, what are you doing? I don't really know--I guess you're standing there trying to look pretty. I really wanted the experiences of a very sort of physical theater. And it was amazing. The train was amazing. Learning to really know what your body is doing through space as you're maybe somersaulting backwards on these wires--know where the ground is and where the sky is and know where your head is and your center of gravity. It's all physically challenging and really exciting.
Scott Charles Stewart is a special effects expert who left George Lucas' ILM to found his own company, The Orphanage, which contributed effects to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Iron Man, and maybe most notably, Korean director Joon-Ho Bong's amazing monster movie The Host.
Stewart has recently started directing features, and with leading man Bettany has made a couple of religious themed action/horror films - Legion, about the Archangel Michael defending humanity from God's wrath, and Priest, based very loosely on the Koreanmanhwa graphic novel series by Min-Woo Hyung, in which Catholic priests, who bear cross tattoos on their faces, have been trained to fight vampires.
In Priest, set in a future society after the Church has defeated the vampire hordes, Bettany plays a Priest, named "Priest", who must re-enter the fray as the vampire menace reasserts itself.
I talked to Bettany and Stewart over the phone, right after the trailer for Priest debuted as a Super Bowl ad.
Michael Marano: [to Paul Bettany] Now, you've made two, very action-oriented features using religious iconography--using staid, very Catholic imagery and themes. Do you feel at odds participating in these action/adventure scenarios that use iconography that we usually thing of being very static, in a Cathedral?
PB: Interesting question! I think that if you are an actor of the moment and you say, "I'm not going to be in a vampire movie," you might not work too much! [laughs] It's peculiar. I've been asked a lot about my involvement with films about religion, and it's just something that has come up. There's been no plan for it. It's peculiar--these films do terribly well in Catholic countries, in actual fact. I remember traveling around Spain with Willem Dafoe, and he was such a huge star there because of The Last Temptation of Christ. Which one would think could cause offense, right? No, they love it! I think people in those Catholic countries are really able to separate fiction from their faith. As far as I know, these movies do very well in Latin countries. There's such rich imagery. I was raised a Catholic. And there's such rich imagery to play with. Why wouldn't you? I don't understand why you wouldn't.
MM: I was raised Catholic, and I'm a novelist. And I find myself using transubstantiation imagery at totally inappropriate moments. Once it's in there, in your head, it's there.
PB: If you look at the Bible as sort of the basis for Western literature, there's a really strong argument that it's the birth of all Western literature. You've got your good guys, you've got your baddies. It's hard not to be derivative from the Bible, and all Judeo-Christian iconography.
MM: One could also argue that it's the origin of all Western theater and film, if you go back to the Passion Plays.
PB: Absolutely! Yeah! And that "tragus" may be, possibly, the Greek word for "goat" and that it's related to "tragedy" and the sacrifices of religion--I mean, fucking hell! You were brought up Catholic! That's where all my notions of theater really came from! It's so theatrical. You go to a service in Rome, and the theater of it! You see the incense cup ["censer", or "thurible"] coming down the center aisle of the cathedral. And there's ten guys with ropes around it trying to stop it, to slow it down. Because it you get in the way, it will fucking crush you. That's the power! And that's so theatrical. There's a lesson to be learned from the power of this [ceremony].
MM: [to Scott Charles Stewart] And I'd like to talk to you about Catholic iconography.
SCS: [laughs] There's a little bit of it in these movies, huh?
MM: And you're directing The Mortal Instruments [based on the popular series of YA books by Cassandra Clare about exiled angels] next, right?
SCS: I certainly hope so!
MM: Could you address how you re-interpolate Catholic iconography for hyper-kinetic action scenes?
SCS: Yeah, Legion is way more of that than Priest, which some people may laugh at because the characters in Priest all have crosses tattooed on their faces. Legion really is a kind of theological experiment by way of 1970s action/horror. It really was a "What If?" scenario. "What if God lost faith in Man? Like He had done in Old Testament times, and do away with Man? And what if His leading angel had not lost faith in Man, and needed to prove to his Father that there was something worth saving?" And then it [Legion] started playing around with the comforting images of suburban life perverted and twisted into images of fear... and the idea that angels are supposed to be cherubic. As opposed to the old imagery of angels that portray them as fierce warriors. Something to fear. Actually images of terror. And that was something I was responding to.... We certainly upset some people with Legion. It wasn't our intent to upset people. I think a lot of people interpreted it that the movie was saying that God was the Bad Guy. And in point of fact, it actually wasn't. Not any more than it was to anyone who experienced the Flood at the time of Noah.... What's fun about playing around with that kind of iconography, there's something very different when you're playing around with Judeo-Christian in a horror context, than if you're dealing with ghosts or different kinds of things. You know, if you look at exorcism kinds of stories? People react to it differently, because we grew up with it. It's ingrained in our very culture. So there's a kind of automatic suspension of disbelief. It gets under people's skin, if they want to believe it or not. So, it's a very powerful thing in a genre story to use those kinds of elements. Priest is different, because it uses the idea of religious iconography, but it's way more interested in it being an analogue for totalitarianism and fascism. It's way more about Orwellian world than it is saying anything specific about this world, church, or religion. The film makes a very clear distinction between the power that comes from God. The priests' supernatural powers come to them through God. The "We live behind walled cities, and we're expected to shovel coal all day" aspect of the film is coming from the authority, the government, which in this case, is the Church, which the world has turned to for protection against vampires.
MM: [to Paul Bettany] Jumping out of iconography and talking about action, is there one particular scene in Priest of which you're most proud?
PB: Oh, God! To be honest, there's a couple of scenes. It is an action movie, and the two action sequences. There's an action sequence that takes place in a place that's called Nightshade, which is like a prison for vampires that has been overrun. And it's the first time that you get to see Priest really get to flex his muscles. And you sense that finally he's actually enjoying it. That's not a good thing. He is good at something again. By what he has done in the war [between the Priests and the Vampires], he has been rendered useless for normal society. And now he finds himself in an environment where he is great again. And I really loved that sequence. It's a sequence that's in the trailer where I sort of get to leap up and stab the vampire in the chest. It's just beautifully done. And the last action sequence, which is almost the whole fifth reel [laughs], on top of the train is kind of epic.
MM: [to Scott Stewart] Is there anything you'd like to talk about with regard to translating a Korean comic book to a Western action movie?
SCS: My principle allegiance was to the script and that was the real template I was working from, so maybe some of this question could be better asked of Cory Goodman, who wrote the script. He did the initial story that we were translating from.... The thing that was most influential to me, when I was first sent the script was, "How can I add something? What interesting thing could I say about the vampire genre?" Because it had been so well explored by so many films and TV shows and such over the years.... And when I thought about the character [of Priest] and the story as it was in the script, I really started to think about John Rambo, in First Blood. And the idea of Vietnam vets who were the survivors of a war that they weren't sure, at the end of the day, that they had fought it for the right reasons... who had gone faithfully into that war and done things that haunted then to this day. And when they returned, they didn't return to a ticker tape parade down Broadway like their fathers before them. They came back to a society that had so decisively fatigued and moved on from war that they only associated them with war and would call them "baby killers" and push them into the shadows of society. That was really interesting to me. So, in the mythology that's set up in our story, our story begins after the war. We set up a mythology. And with regard to... paying homage to [Priest graphic novel creator] Min-Woo Hyung, what we wanted to do was present an alternate history of the world [of the Priest comic books]. And it was a very, very expensive sequence to do in live action, and the studio said, "Well, do we really need to do this?" And I thought it was really, really important. So, I came back and I said, well, "What if I could do it for this price?" They said, "If you can really do it for this price... if you can figure out a way to do it, then you can do it." I cam back to them and told them that we're doing to it fully animated, and in 2D. So I called a very dear friend of mine [Samurai Jack creator] Genndy Tartakovsky... to come in and create this with me. And together we made this prologue to the move. And he looked at Min-Woo's work and was really influenced by it and did what he thought was an American version of it.
MM: [to Paul Bettany] What are the specific challenges of working on films that so heavily use CGI? Is it like doing "black box" theater with the green screens and the imagining of settings and characters?
PB: Some of it's peculiar. You might be fighting a stunt man in a silver suit dressed up like DEVO, which is kind of peculiar. And it gets more peculiar when you're in the air stabbing a pillow, as I was, trusting that it was going to be turned into a vampire [in post-production]. Those were odd moments. There's stuff on the train, there was stuff on the train carriage, and there was [Star Trek and Lord of the Rings'] Karl Urban [who plays a bad guy named Black Hat], with me and him fighting and a lot of wire-work, and yes, there was a blue screen. But you didn't sense it. And it didn't get in the way. And God forbid that you actually were on a moving train. At one point in the movie, I actually was on the side of a moving train at 50 miles per hour and it was fucking terrifying! [laughs] So, you wouldn't want to actually be fighting on top of that thing. The challenge is less imaginative at that point and more physical. I really wanted to do my own action. If you are in an action movie and you're not doing your own action, what are you doing? I don't really know--I guess you're standing there trying to look pretty. I really wanted the experiences of a very sort of physical theater. And it was amazing. The train was amazing. Learning to really know what your body is doing through space as you're maybe somersaulting backwards on these wires--know where the ground is and where the sky is and know where your head is and your center of gravity. It's all physically challenging and really exciting.